The Chávez Code and Eva’s Deceits

03.06.05 | VenEconomy reviews for the
benefit of its readers the new
“chavista” best seller titled
“The Chávez Code.” The
book was written by Eva
Golinger, a U.S.-Venezuelan
dual national whom
President Hugo Chávez has
personally baptized, “The
Bride of the Bolivarian
Revolution.”

Why be subtle? The Spanish-language
version of “The Chávez Code,” launched officially
in Havana before it arrived in Caracas
recently, is 355 pages of organic fertilizer dedicated
to the memory of Danilo Anderson, the
prosecutor killed by a car bomb in November
2004. Anderson was buried in a grand ceremony
where President Chávez praised him
as a hero of the revolution. Then police investigators
posthumously exposed Anderson
as the presumed leader of a gang of extortionists
working out of the Attorney
General’s office. Golinger should dedicate a
book of lies and distortions to the memory of
a public prosecutor who has been pointed
out to be crooked instead of heroic.
Golinger reportedly is living in the Caracas
Hilton as an official guest of the Chávez government.

A recent interview in Exceso magazine,
and anecdotal reports of her travels
throughout Venezuela on book-signing tours,
confirm that Golinger is delighted with her 15
minutes of fame. The Chávez government is
certainly delighted with Golinger, whose meteoric
rise to Bolivarian fame started when
she was interviewed on television in the
United States while protesting in support of
Chávez in New York City. Now she is the author
of the Bolivarian Revolution’s “true”
account of the forces and events surrounding
the violence of April 11-14, 2002, in which
Chávez left the presidency and returned to
power less than 48 hours later.
The official Bolivarian truth recounted by
Golinger is that the government of the United
States conspired to oust Chávez from power
by working through the Central Intelligence
Agency and the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) to finance, organize and
train a civilian-military coup against Chávez.
Golinger bases this claim on documents she
obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) with the help of a U.S.
photojournalist named Jeremy Bigwood (if readers wish to know more about Bigwood,
do a Google search and click on his web page).

VenEconomy read the book from cover to
cover. This included double-checking what
Golinger claims in the principal text of the book
with the official U.S. documents that she obtained
under the FOIA and cited in the book’s
footnotes. In every case involving a specific
quote linked by footnote to a specific U.S.
official document in the book’s appendix,
VenEconomy found that none of the statements
she attributes to various U.S. diplomats
in the main text of the book are found
there. She cites the U.S. documents included
at the back of the book in English as the source
of these statements. This is odd, considering
that Golinger claims that her many professional
skills – besides immigration and entertainment
industry lawyer, jazz singer and
nouveau glitterati of the Bolivarian Revolution
– also includes certified translations.
VenEconomy did not count all of the factual
mistakes, distortions and lies in the book.
However, following is a small sample of Eva’s
deceits. First, Golinger claims in her biographical
description that she obtained “ultra-secret”
CIA documents through the FOIA. This
is untrue. The CIA documents in question
were never even designated as classified
documents. They consisted of intra-government
security briefings the CIA provides daily
to a restricted number of U.S. government
officials. The reports are confidential, but they
are not secret.

Golinger claims that she obtained her trove
of official U.S. documents through FOIA requests
that Bigwood assisted her with. She
claims in a recent interview in Exceso magazine
that no one helped her financially. However,
this is untrue. The U.S. government
charges fees for providing documents sought
under FOIA requests. Depending on how
many documents are sought, the costs climb
quickly to thousands of dollars. Nevertheless, Golinger promises her readers the investigation will “continue
for decades.” Who will finance it?

On page 49 of her book, Golinger claims that NED and the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have spent
“more than $20 million” in Venezuela since 2001 to “foment
conflict and instability.” Elsewhere in the book, Golinger says
the sum spent by NED and USIAD was $2 million. This could
be a typographical mistake, of course.

In Chapter 3, which starts on page 59, Golinger discusses the
natural tragedy that destroyed Vargas state on December 15,
1999. She states that the torrential rains started on Dec. 14, one
day before the Avila Mountain slid downhill into the sea. This
is mistaken. It rained almost ceaselessly for over a week before
Dec. 15, and civil defense officials reportedly warned Chávez
on repeated occasions that a natural disaster was imminent.
However, Chávez was more interested in campaigning for his
new Constitution than in flooding rivers or landslides. He ignored
all warnings, and did not react publicly until at least three
days after hundreds died and tens of thousands were left homeless.
Golinger also claims on page 60 that the U.S. unilaterally sent
military warships and Marines towards Venezuela without being
invited in the aftermath of the Vargas tragedy. She goes on
to say that, when Chávez learned of the U.S. action, he issued
orders that the uninvited Yankees be turned away. This is also
false. The U.S. government officially offered humanitarian assistance,
which the then-Venezuelan Minister of Defense Raúl
Salazar accepted. The President subsequently overruled him
when the boats were already on their way.

In Chapter 4, Golinger discusses the International Republican
Institute (IRI), a Republican offshoot of the NED. The Democratic
Party has the National Democratic Institute (NDI). She
describes Georges Fauriol as the head of the IRI’s Latin America
program on page 70. This is incorrect. Fauriol is the IRI’s director
of global strategic planning. He is the former director of the
Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. His expertise almost exclusively centers on Haiti. Fauriol
was taken to the IRI by its president, George A. Folsom, who
has good Republican connections through Brent Scowcroft
but is not regarded as the brightest bulb in the Republican-
Latin American policymaking circles of Washington, D.C.
Golinger does a fast shuffle on page 74, where she refers to
U.S. laws that supposedly prohibit the NED and its offshoots
financing political parties outside the U.S. She cites Title 2,
Section 441e of the U.S. Federal Criminal Code, as reportedly
barring the U.S. from interfering in any foreign local, state or
national elections. In fact, the statute she cites refers to foreign
financiers of U.S. political campaigns. NED and similar entities
are regulated by other U.S. legislation. In any case, NED, the
IRI and NDI do not finance the political campaigns of foreign
politicians.

In Chapter 5, Golinger cites documents that purportedly show
the U.S. Embassy knew a coup against Chávez was being planned as early as September 2001. The documents she includes
in the book, and which are found on her web site, do not
substantiate that assertion even remotely. Golinger also claims
in this chapter that other documents, which she included in the
book’s appendix, prove the U.S. government shared and encouraged
the political opposition’s desires to throw Chávez
out of power.

VenEconomy read the documents in the appendix, and then
consulted other documents at her web site, and none of the
documents substantiate her claim. VenEconomy wants to make
it clear that the criticism here centers on apparently sloppy
research and unsubstantiated claims not supported by any of
the alleged evidence cited by Golinger. In VenEconomy’s view,
the book overall is disorganized and poorly written, and its
supportive documentation doesn’t validate any of the claims
the author makes about alleged U.S. encouragement and advance
knowledge of a coup against Chávez.

That said, in the weeks before the violence of April 11-14,
2002, the persons who most frequently claimed that a military
coup was imminent were Chávez and then-Defense Minister
(now Vice President) Jose Vicente Rangel. This is a matter of
public record.

In Chapter 6, Golinger claims that former U.S. Ambassador
Charles Shapiro, who arrived in Caracas in February 2002, had
been a military adviser at the U.S. Embassy in Chile when President
Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup. This
is incorrect. Shapiro is a career foreign service officer, a diplomat,
not a military official. He certainly did have an image as a
tough guy because he spent time in El Salvador in the 1980s
and was the senior Cuban Affairs officer at the State Department
before arriving in Venezuela.

However, Shapiro wasn’t sent to Caracas because the Bush
administration wanted to take a tougher stance with Chávez. In
the State Department’s ambassadorial seniority list, Shapiro
was next in line for an ambassadorship, and then-Ambassador
Donna Hrinak’s term in Caracas was nearly over. U.S. ambassadors
rarely stay in one post more than two or three years. In any
case, Ambassador Shapiro soon earned the nickname of
“Goofy” among opposition leaders, which definitely is not a
nickname appropriate to the tough guy image that preceded his
arrival in Venezuela.

When she discusses Otto Reich, Golinger claims the U.S.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee blocked his appointment
as Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere.
Actually, the culprit was Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT),
who has a personal feud with Reich dating back 20 years.
Golinger claims on page 103 that the CIA had “detailed knowledge”
about the coup against Chávez that could only mean the
CIA was in close direct contact with the conspirators. However,
the CIA documents she cites are not any different in content
than the reports that were being published and broadcast daily
during those tense days in April 2002 by the Venezuelan news
media. The CIA reports not claim to know more about the alleged coup against Chávez than what was in the news media
locally at the time. They do, however, contain analytical judgments
that lean towards predicting that some kind of move
against Chávez was imminent.

Golinger cites former CNN correspondent Otto Neustadt’s
alleged claim that on April 10, one day before the march against
Chávez ended in death by gunfire in downtown Caracas, he
was approached by a group of generals and admirals that wanted
to pre-tape a message to be shown on April 11 after people had
been killed and injured. Neustadt lost credibility. He was sacked
by CNN soon after the events of April 2002 because unedited
videotape he transmitted to CNN’s world broadcast center in
Atlanta contained outtakes that showed the CNN reporter had
a close personal relationship with then-Vice President Diosdado
Cabello. CNN’s management concluded that Neustadt was compromised
professionally and they terminated his employment
contract.

The timelines Golinger cites for the violence that occurred in
downtown Caracas do not match the known facts. She claims
video of rooftop snipers was destroyed by the private television
channels, which is also false. There hasn’t been proof that there ever were any rooftop snipers. Forensic analysis and photographic
evidence from April 11, 2002, presently consigned
before an international court proves conclusively that the descending
trajectory of the bullets that killed 19 persons resulted
from the fact that “chavista” shooters were firing at anti-government
protesters from higher elevations and at a long distance.
On page 111, Golinger attributes to Shapiro a written statement
in quotes that she footnotes to an embassy cable in the
book’s appendix of documents. The document does not contain
the statement. This is a recurring problem with Golinger’s
footnoted citations throughout the book.

“The Chávez Code” doesn’t stop at the events of April 2002.
It includes chapters on the oil strike of December 2002-January
2003, and the August 2004 presidential recall referendum.
VenEconomy found many more inaccuracies in these chapters,
but did not want to deprive others of the chance to make their
own discoveries as they read this Bolivarian best seller.
Besides, this book review is already too long.